Drogarth.

The name alone conjures dark images of spilling blood, of blackest magiks, of lawlessness and chaos. Throughout the kingdom children hear stories of this evil city and are told they must never go there — and they wish with all their hearts that one day they will. For children are the custodians of wishes, of dreams; they know in their hearts, in their souls, that only in the darkest of pits can the brightest adventures be found…

Years and years ago, when I had a bit more spring in my step and fewer callouses on my heart, I got out of a misguided stint in the U.S. Army and plopped down at a cheap portable typewriter to begin living the life I always intended to live, that of a dashing and prolific novelist.

I was living on savings, shacking up in Kassel, West Germany (there was still an East Germany then) with a wonderful girlfriend named Rike (whom I’d met the very day I’d arrived at my Army post), who was deep in her own university studies while I took the time to write.

It was a happy year. It was the most productive year of my life, too.

First, I wrote a short fantasy adventure novel called The Road to Adventure. It was sort of stock fantasy — knights and elves and hot pagan priestesses — mixed with sheer swashbuckling and quite a bit of eldritch horror. Took me just over a month to write, and I got it in the mail and started the next project.

The Road to Adventure damn near got published too. A senior editor at one of the big science fiction/fantasy publishers took a liking to it and went to bat for it with the editorial board. See, getting a book published isn’t just a matter of getting a “yes,” it’s a matter of getting a series of “yeses,” and if you get a “no” in that series, you’re screwed. According to the editor, I had the majority of folks wanting the book, but got two key noes; I was screwed. But hey, pretty good for the first shot.

Of course, that resolution took a while, during which I wrote my second book. This took a lot longer than a month. Whereas I’d written Road with a detailed outline, I started this one with a setting, a couple of character ideas, and the notion that I was gonna write a “hardboiled fantasy,” mixing standard sword and sorcery tropes with gritty crime fiction. And I had the title:

Skullduggery. A Tale of Thieves.

I dove in with reckless confidence, writing five pages a day, then rewriting the previous day’s output, and the book grew and grew. The setting became a real place in my mind, gaining complexity and mass. The cast grew almost out of control, until the book became a weave of subplots crossing and clashing. And things happened. Damn did things happen. Small, personal, violent things. Big, dark, scary things. Portentous things with repercussions beyond the everyday reality of that world.

The novel became a big treasure chest I kept throwing cool stuff in. Thieves. Gypsies. Ninjas. Musketeers. Highwaymen. Madmen. Pirates. Treachery. Monsters…

By the time I typed “END,” the book was roughly 600 pages long. And as I geared up to revise it, I got a call from that editor in New York, who’d already delivered the bad news about Road’s non-publication a while back, but had liked my writing so much she wanted to know what I had in the works. I told her, and she had me send a copy of the first draft.

Well. She liked the writing. But she didn’t like the book, and had another editor read it for a second opinion, and that editor hadn’t cared for it either.

Or, more precisely, they didn’t think it was publishable. For one thing, it was pretty fucking big for a first novel; it costs more money to print a thick book, and they couldn’t be sure about making production costs back on a big book by an unknown.

The other thing was, they thought it was too profane and violent for a mainstream fantasy book. I thought I was bringing in something vibrant and raw from crime fiction; they thought I was gonna scare all the questing unicorn readers out there. Mind you, this was the mid-eighties, and since then, the fantasy genre has changed quite a bit (though not, entirely, for the better), and content like mine isn’t so outre’ any more.

I disagreed with them, and while I respected their opinions (and recognized their bottom line issues with publishing such a big book), I also thought they were being sort of condescending to their readers by trying to protect them from such a harsh fantasy world.

But…this woman loved my writing, and had been my main cheerleader at the one publisher who had shown solid interest in Road to Adventure. Getting shot down by her, at that stage, before I was even really getting a grip on the first revision, was crushing. I’d seen her as my shot at glory, once the book was truly ready, and now the shot seemed stillborn.

I floundered. I set it aside, always meaning to go back and bash it into some highly wonderful shape that would overcome all of a publisher’s objections, but I never did. But I still remembered living that book as I wrote it, and while it was a very big book for a fledgling author, it really did have a lot of cool stuff in it.

Now, realistically, with the Doc Wilde series and other projects, I have too much on my agenda to think I’m going to get around to revising it after all this time. But I figured I’d put it up here in weekly chunks for the interested. It’s rough, and the product of a much younger me, but you might just enjoy it. And if not, whaddayawantfernuthin? Rubber biscuit?

Anyway, I hope you like it.

Go HERE to discover Drogarth, the City of Thieves.

Time is the currency of relationship, but interest only accrues if you spend it.

In that post, I mentioned that the producer’s “coverage” (a detailed summary/review of the script for in-house use) had been leaked, but I wasn’t able to find it.

Thankfully, “belzecue” posted a comment to that entry, pointing to a copy of that coverage posted to a screenwriting news site.

Because the coverage is, naturally, full of spoilers, I don’t want to just dump it here or just post the URL, lest it ruin the reading of the actual full script for someone. It has a tricky twist or three I don’t want you to have spoiled.

So, I’m going to post a heavily redacted version first, editing out most of the plot details, but leaving in the writer’s general opinion of the story.

Then, after the jump, I’ll post the entire coverage, in the hopes that people won’t read it until they’ve read the actual script (you can find the link to it in the original entry). To make the read easier, I’m adding some paragraph breaks where there weren’t any, as the original uses huge blocks of text that won’t read well online.

EDITED, NON-SPOILERY VERSION

Title of Submission: Blood of Eden
Author: Tim Byrd & Steve Antczak
Date Covered: 9/2/99
Genre: Action Adventure

STORY
This screenplay’s story is a very complex and sophisticated tale, presenting its drama and tension in an undersea setting. While there are more and more space- and sea-oriented films these days, this screenplay stands out on the merits of its excellent writing and the incredibly detailed, yet believable, environment in which it takes place. I have some plausibility questions, but they are minor and can be easily addressed….

CHARACTER
While the characters’ main personalities and motivations are clear, I’d like to see them developed a bit more…In this story, it’s very refreshing to see all the bad guys (the ninja) referenced by name, rather than by Ninja #1, Ninja #2…it’s a nice thing to have the bad guys be real people names…

DIALOGUE
Dialogue in this screenplay is a mixed bag. Overall, it’s fine, and it’s especially refreshing to hear the Japanese bad guys using realistic dialogue. Unfortunately, this quickly unravels into typical American macho expletives. The contrast of Japanese thought and phrasing versus the language we are used to hearing is one of the points which made this screenplay unique. Also, some of the American dialogue is either weak (“then the bad guys struck”) or too obvious as exposition (Travis and Desmond comparing backgrounds). In an otherwise very fine screenplay, dialogue is an area that could use improvement.

THEME
“Blood of Eden” is more action-packed than theme-packed, but does touch on several interesting topics, including nationalism versus Pacific Rim countries, maternal and paternal instincts, heroism and honor.

WRITER’S STYLE
The writers do a stellar job of writing action, weaving a tense, sophisticated and compelling tale. Their descriptions of environment and physical action, in particular, are exemplary. All of the hand-to-hand scenes are vividly depicted. The descriptions of the Edensphere do a great job of making the complex “seeable.” Lots of the action and other descriptions are almost literary in their quality, such as the spattering of bullets, the rushing of walls of water, etc. The writers’ challenge is to bring the quality of their characterizations and dialogue up to par with the rest of the screenplay, but I’m sure they can do it.

STRUCTURE
The structure here provides a strong foundation for the story. All scenes are vital and either propel the action or impart necessary information…

SETTING ORIGINALITY
The writers have done a great job of imagining and describing an entire undersea environment and the rules for survival there. Edensphere’s location in the Pacific, however, is unclear. It’s not too far from San Francisco…but it’s clearly far enough north to be in frigid waters. From the “Northern Pacific” slug lines, I kept imaging someplace off the Alaska coast.

ENTERTAINMENT VALUE
This screenplay has great potential as a very entertaining and marketable commercial venture. It gets off to a good start, jumps into action very quickly and keeps the action going til the very end…

And now, the un-redacted version…

FULL, VERY-SPOILERY VERSION

Title of Submission: Blood of Eden
Author: Tim Byrd & Steve Antczak
Type of Material: Screenplay
Draft Date: 8/25/99
Number of Pages: 119
Date Covered: 9/2/99
Genre: Action Adventure
Location: Experimental habitat in North Pacific
Circa: Present Day

Logline
A security expert struggles to save himself, his pregnant wife, and other hostages when an experimental undersea habitat is taken over by high-tech ninja.

Synopsis
It’s an important day at Edensphere, the underwater habitat which hangs suspended beneath an off-shore oil rig in the northern Pacific. Years of work by Kyoto-based Kirishima Corporation will be put to the test today as the facility is demonstrated to SENATOR HOYDEN SHEFFIELD. Sheffield’s positive response will clear the way for Edensphere’s technologies to be licensed by NASA. It’s not a given that the Senator will vote positive: even though Edensphere is staffed by a primarily American crew, it’s a Japanese business and constituents don’t like seeing their tax dollars go to Japan.

Heading Edensphere are husband and wife TRAVIS and ANDREA MOORE. Travis is head of security, while very-pregnant Andrea is project manager. Accompanying the senator are his assistant, DESMOND COHEN (28), and Kirishima execs, including senior exec WATANABE SAIGO and up-and-coming SEN-ICHI (22). A small crew mans the surface-based control room while this group descends into the expansive facility.

In a nearby trawler, 15 Japanese don wetsuits and sink beneath the ocean surface. As their presence is detected by sonar in the undersea control room, a Japanese employee accesses a “black box” and eliminates the sonar reading. Hmmm…

As the divers near Edensphere, Andrea pitches the project to Senator Sheffield. As aide Desmond excuses himself to find the restroom (actually looking for a place to smoke), Linda sabotages a security monitor and the divers board the facility. Meanwhile, Travis goes in search of Desmond, since smoking is a no-no.

Linda subdues her counterpart in the security center, and signals the divers to proceed. The divers are led by a stunning SHIVA and handsome KANO (mid 30′s), and all are ninjas loaded with arms and gadgetry. Linda cuts the feed to the surface-based control room. The divers subdue guards as they make their way through the facility. Still searching for Desmond, Travis spies the ninjas and locks himself into the security room, where he and Linda scuffle til he finally stabs her to death.

The ninjas take over the operations center. They take Sheffield’s group hostage, with Shiva announcing that they’d rather not slaughter everyone. As Travis scrambles, Shiva realizes that he’s missing and sends ninja after him. Travis continues, knocking out video cameras, with two ninja tracking him.

Shiva’s group divert the video feed to the surface-based monitors and, as the monitor shows her holding the group hostage, she announces that she is here to satisfy a debt of honor, owed by the Kirishima Corporation, and its head Kirishima Masakazu, to Shiva’s family. She demands that Kirishima Masakazu come pay the debt in blood, and that one hostage per hour will die until he arrives. Shiva’s ace-up-the-sleeve is that she knows that Sen-Ichi is Kirishima’s grandson, last of the line. He’ll never allow them to kill Sen-Ichi.

To prove her seriousness, Shiva executes Watanabe. Travis keeps running and tries sending an SOS but it is blocked. The ninjas almost nab him but he escapes into the pump room, filled with energy-generating plumbing. In a gun battle, Travis is wounded but takes out a few of his opponents.

The more important casualty, however, is the hull of the sphere which is ruptured by a ninja’s plastique explosive. The doomsday clock begins to tick now, as the ocean floods into the sphere. The facility automatically seals part of itself off, but the damage is already massive.

Shiva and her group suspect that Travis has been killed, and Shiva tells Andrea, but they still keep an eye out for Travis. Andrea is devastated.

Still sneaking around, Travis comes upon Desmond who’s been in hiding. The two team up. Meanwhile, Kirishima gets the news and he and bodyguard TETSUO begin their journey.

Sheffield inquires about Desmond, alerting Shiva to the fact that she has another loose end. She sends more ninja in search. Travis and Desmond duke it out when these ninja, and barely survive before killing their assailants.

Meanwhile, it’s time for Shiva to sacrifice another Kirishima executive, which she does. Senator Sheffield tries to tackle her to save the man. Shiva has no patience for his heroics, and gives him an unforgettable reminder to sit still: she chops off his left hand! Her people then apply a tourniquet and give Sheffield first aid. Shiva’s ruthless but not heartless. Andrea jumps all over Shiva, but Shiva spares her, saying she doesn’t want to harm Andrea or her baby.

The crew from the surface-side room try to negotiate, finally succeeding in getting Shiva to stop the hourly executions, pending Kirishima’s arrival. Travis and Desmond make their way, through obstacles and treacherous going, to an operations room, where they can see what’s happened and what is still happening. Travis sees evidence that Andrea is still alive, and is spurred on in his quest to save her.

Shiva meanwhile, zeroes in once again on Travis’s location and sends more ninja. This time, Desmond is shot in the leg and captured, but Travis escapes, taking out a few more ninja. He’s finally captured after losing several fingers, and is exceedingly surprised to find Shiva tending his wounds. She explains that she’s a Harvard-trained doctor, and that she’s going to kill Kirishima because he killed some of her friends. Travis and Andrea have a tearful reunion.

Kirishima arrives in San Francisco and boards a helicopter, with a troop of commandos, for the last leg of his journey. When they reach Edensphere, Kirishima insists that his commandos take over for the surface-based crew. Whatever – it’s his company.

Kirishima’s man Tetsuo does the talking with Shiva, and they are not strangers. Hearing his voice, Shiva flashes back to a scene where Tetsuo savagely rapes her after having murdered her family. She was hugely pregnant at the time.

As Tetsuo buys time talking with Shiva, the commandos infiltrate the sphere. Kirishima talks quietly with an old man who looks very much like Kirishima himself. AOTSUKA does as ordered, becomes the stand-in for Kirishima and makes his way to Shiva’s group. Shiva is only fooled briefly and executes Aotsuka, but this buys time for the commandos to tighten their grip.

Realizing that Kirishima has the upper hand, Shiva orders her ninjas to take Sen-Ichi and clear out. The ninja activate a gadget which sends out an electromagnetic pulse, disabling most of the sphere’s operations.

Sen-Ichi makes a break for it, more ninja die, Sen-Ichi escapes in an elevator, but Shiva tosses a grenade in at the last second. When the elevator opens, Tetsuo finds a dead Sen-Ichi and two dead commandos. Kirishima orders his grandson’s body be taken to the helicopter, and he contemplates his next move.

Back in the sphere, the hostages and Shiva’s group are in a standoff, the arrival of the commandos having turned things into chaos. When Shiva insists that Kirishima will destroy the sphere with whomever may be aboard, the senator and Travis are at first unconvinced. But when bombs begin to explode, all are convinced that they are doomed.

Shiva and Travis’s people join forces and struggle mightily to make their way through a disabled sphere that’s now not only filling with water, but floating almost free and twisting around on its axis. They face Herculean odds in making their way to safety, and battle commandos along the way.

Shiva loses her will to go on when Kano is killed, and she stays behind. Sheffield dies heroically trying to save Desmond. Topside, Kirishima sets the timer on a nuclear bomb and prepares to leave. Desmond sacrifices his life to take bullets aimed for Andrea.

Travis and Andrea make it to the surface, where Travis takes out Tetsuo. Travis accosts Kirishima. He and Kirishima duke it out, and Shiva saves Travis’s life by beheading Kirishima, but she’s gravely injured. They find the bomb, which Shiva’s cousin SAM takes with him aboard a helicopter while Travis and Andrea take Shiva in the ninja’s getaway sub. The bomb blast rocks the sub, but Travis and Andrea survive. Shiva dies. Amazingly, Andrea’s baby kicks, confirming that he’s survived the mayhem intact.

Comments

STORY
This screenplay’s story is a very complex and sophisticated tale, presenting its drama and tension in an undersea setting. While there are more and more space- and sea-oriented films these days, this screenplay stands out on the merits of its excellent writing and the incredibly detailed, yet believable, environment in which it takes place.

I have some plausibility questions, but they are minor and can be easily addressed. I found Shiva’s elaborate plan to be in need of further explanation. She’s recruited a small of army of people including an insider in the Kirishima organization to execute her plan. How is it that she’s a ninja? Who are these other people and why are they willing to help her?

Shiva’s ruthlessness versus her humane-ness is a good touch, but could use some work to come across as a more convincing dichotomy. We assume that she spares Andrea because of maternal instinct and that she doesn’t really want to hurt anyone except Kirishima employees, but this could be challenged a bit more to give her a chance to voice her attitude.

The scene where Bill Logan talks Shiva into sparing more hostages from execution happens too easily. She’s a woman with a mission and with the gleam of revenge in her eyes – make it a little harder for Bill to talk her into this.

While Shiva holds the group hostage, we cut for quite some time to track Travis. I think that this leaves the audience sort of forgetting about the group as they focus on Travis. Some intercutting to show what’s happening with the hostages, even just that they are quiet and frightened, would keep the audience reminded of their plight. We also must assume that the group on the surface and the group that Andrea is addressing are the only people in the sphere, other than Linda and her group and a few stray guards. It would help, I think, to make this clearer earlier, since I kept wondering what everyone else in this massive bubble was doing as Andrea et al were taken hostage.

I’d also like to have some sense of where Desmond disappears to, because I kept wondering about it until he reappeared. This left me looking for him to pop up.

The scene in which Kirishima’s commandos take over the operation left me wondering how it was that they were knowledgeable enough to infiltrate this complex space. A bit of exposition, beyond their studying blueprints, about how they know enough to be effective would help.

Finally, the notion of Shiva and hers joining forces with Travis and his happens to fast too be believable. I’d be hard-pressed to team up with someone who just chopped my hand off and executed several people before my eyes. It should be relatively easy, though, to show the two groups agonizing over their decision to team up, or show them going separate ways briefly before they are forced to join forces.

CHARACTER
While the characters’ main personalities and motivations are clear, I’d like to see them developed a bit more. The setup of Travis and Bill as buddies is very brief. How do they know each other? Why has Bill taken this job? Andrea and Travis are also set up very briefly, although fairly effectively. But the audience’s sympathy for them is tied mostly to the fact of Andrea’s pregnancy, a pretty obvious device. Tell us more about these people to make us care about them.

From the viewpoint of Kirishima and Tetsuo, I’d like to know what kind of business they were in that they murdered Shiva’s family (husband, father?), and how it is that their reputation to the U.S. is of fine, honorable men. What kind of man is Kirishima? What are his motivations? Is he just a ruthless businessman who’s been operating with the tactics of a samurai, or is he really part of a Japanese “tong” or mafia? What did Shiva’s family have to do with Kirishima?

In this story, it’s very refreshing to see all the bad guys (the ninja) referenced by name, rather than by Ninja #1, Ninja #2. Granted, they are actually quasi-good guys, but it’s still a nice thing to have the bad guys be real people names.

Finally, and most importantly, Travis is very solidly set up as a thinker, not a doer on page 1 of the screenplay. That being said, he jumps immediately into rip-roaring action, with hardly a pause to breathe, no less think. Either don’t set him up as a thinker, or show us his thinking/planning along with his action.

DIALOGUE
Dialogue in this screenplay is a mixed bag. Overall, it’s fine, and it’s especially refreshing to hear the Japanese quasi-bad guys using realistic dialogue. Unfortunately, this quickly unravels into typical American macho expletives. The contrast of Japanese thought and phrasing versus the language we are used to hearing is one of the points which made this screenplay unique. Also, some of the American dialogue is either weak (“then the bad guys struck”) or too obvious as exposition (Travis and Desmond comparing backgrounds). In an otherwise very fine screenplay, dialogue is an area that could use improvement.

THEME
“Blood of Eden” is more action-packed than theme-packed, but does touch on several interesting topics, including nationalism versus Pacific Rim countries, maternal and paternal instincts, heroism and honor.

WRITER’S STYLE
The writers do a stellar job of writing action, weaving a tense, sophisticated and compelling tale. Their descriptions of environment and physical action, in particular, are exemplary. All of the hand-to-hand scenes are vividly depicted. The descriptions of the Edensphere do a great job of making the complex “seeable.” Lots of the action and other descriptions are almost literary in their quality, such as the spattering of bullets, the rushing of walls of water, etc. The writers’ challenge is to bring the quality of their characterizations and dialogue up to par with the rest of the screenplay, but I’m sure they can do it.

STRUCTURE
The structure here provides a strong foundation for the story. All scenes are vital and either propel the action or impart necessary information. The ticking clock of a hull breach, and the later ticking clock of a bomb, are very well used devices. Desmond’s reappearance and then Andrea’s almost immediately learning that he’s missing were an excellent example of “a big sigh and then dashed hopes.” My only negative comments about structure are minor: Why does Travis stop in a restroom and wash up? Seems like an odd thing to do, with no purpose except for him to register the fact that Andrea is in danger. Kirishima and Tetsuo’s first scene seems to come awfully late, after much time has passed after Andrea’s announcement of her plan. Moving it a bit earlier should be simple, though.

SETTING ORIGINALITY
The writers have done a great job of imagining and describing an entire undersea environment and the rules for survival there. Edensphere’s location in the Pacific, however, is unclear. It’s not too far from San Francisco, since Kirishima’s helicopter flies between the two locales in not much time, but it’s clearly far enough north to be in frigid waters. From the “Northern Pacific” slug lines, I kept imaging someplace off the Alaska coast.

ENTERTAINMENT VALUE
This screenplay has great potential as a very entertaining and marketable commercial venture. It gets off to a good start, jumps into action very quickly and keeps the action going til the very end. And while I must commend and admire the excellent action writing, I probably wouldn’t go see this movie, primarily based on the amount and nature of the carnage throughout. The sensitive subject of “film+violence” aside, I find the notion of people being beheaded, dismembered, or having brains blown out to be extremely offputting. But that’s just me. Other aspects which also score on my personal “no thanks” list are people shitting themselves or urinating when they are afraid, people vomiting, and the word “cunt”.

COMMENTS
Miscellaneous comments about “Blood of Eden”: What’s the flying time between Kyoto and San Francisco? Is it feasible compared to the time span of the screenplay? If someone chopped off your hand, would applying a tourniquet really do any good? Wouldn’t you bleed to death anyway? And, if you didn’t bleed to death, wouldn’t you be in a pretty serious state of shock – serious enough that you wouldn’t be fit for action? And, my biggest question (which is due to ignorance and is not a challenge in the least) – what’s the main difference between a ninja and a samurai. Are ninja primarily good forces, whereas samurai have an evil reputation? Without a moral distinction, it seems a bit like the pot calling the kettle black for Shiva to be a ninja ragging on a samurai.”

Shane also wrote and directed the INCREDIBLE Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which is oceans full of fun, and has great performances by Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, and Michelle Monaghan.

But I digress.

Seriously, we'll all be better off if you let Tim write the movie.

Shortly after Lethal Weapon 2 was released, I had what I figured was a great idea for a third movie in the series. I wrote a treatment, and Shane took a look.

He liked it. He liked what I did with his characters. He liked the flow of the story, which took Riggs and Murtaugh to Europe, working with Interpol agents to track down the guys who were supposed to ship a lot of heroin to the bad guys in Lethal Weapon, except that delivery was never made because the good guys killed all the guys who were supposed to sign the delivery receipt.

Naturally, the guys at the other end of that shipment were pretty annoyed, especially their leader, referenced in this bit, retrieved from faded memory because the actual document was lost years ago:

RIGGS
(looking through binoculars)
Oh no.

MURTAUGH
What? What is it?

RIGGS
Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

MURTAUGH
Damn it, Riggs, what the hell do you see? Gimme those glasses!

He snatches them.

MURTAUGH
Okay…it’s a guy. Do you know him?

RIGGS
Yeah…I know him. He’s bad news…

MURTAUGH
What do you mean, “bad news?”

RIGGS
I mean he’s bad fucking news. He’s…he’s the guy that trained me, back in ‘Nam….He’s better than me…

MURTAUGH
What? How can he be better than you? I thought you were the best.

RIGGS
I am the best, Rodge. But this guy…he’s the worst.

It’s rough, but it was only a rough treatment. And this is, as I said, from memory.

Anyway. The story tied back to the first film, but developed in new directions. I didn’t repeat the same stuff from the previous film, like Leo and his “They fuck you at the drive-thru” gag (funny the first time, really strained when they did it again). The characters gained some depth. Riggs acted wild out of a desire to feel alive, not just for the chuckles of stupid suicidal thrills.

So Shane showed it to the folks in charge. And they opted to go with Jeffrey Boam’s story, which had its fun points, but had a thin story, overdid the repeats from the earlier films, and lost sight of who the characters really were (like having Riggs and Murtaugh bully people for fun).

Well, it was a very long shot, at best.

Some time after that, I was hanging out with my writer friend Steve Antczak, and we started batting around ideas for a possible third flick in the Die Hard series. We ran through several, some of which have actually appeared onscreen since, like the amusement park setting of Beverly Hills Cop 3. Which I never actually saw.

I’d been toying with an idea about an undersea biosphere, and it occurred to me that such a place would be great for that Die Hard trapped-in-a-microcosm-with-bad-guys dynamic. Steve liked the notion, and we worked out a solid rationale for John McClane to be in such a high concept locale, some ideas about what the place was like, and a story.

This we wrote up as a 28 page treatment. Now, treatments are usually short. My Lethal Weapon treatment was only five or six pages. The “experts” warn you not to write lengthy treatments because nobody will read ‘em.

Most of the Hollywood folks who read it said they wished our treatment was longer. Including folks at Joel Silver’s office, the producer of the Lethal Weapons and Die Hards and Matrixs and lots of other things. Including Xanadu. But, they said, alas, we’re not gonna be doing another Die Hard.

They were right. A few years later, the third one came out, Die Hard With A Vengeance, and Silver Pictures had nothing to do with it. The folks who made it, naturally, had never heard of our treatment.

I lost touch with Steve for a few years. Then we ran into each other, and we talked about our treatment, and how it was a shame we’d written it as a story with only one market, the Die Hard folks. And we said, heck, let’s go ahead and write it into a full screenplay, but write it as a project unto itself, not tied to anyone else’s intellectual property.

So we did. The result, Blood of Eden, was obviously in the Die Hard genre, along with things like Speed and Under Siege and Air Force One, but it stood on its own, with original characters, some nice twists, complex villains, and some awesome action set pieces.

At this time, Steve had an agent in La-La Land, so we let him distribute it to the four winds. We got nice comments back. People liked it. But no bites.

After months of nothing, all of a sudden, a movie rumor site called Coming Attractions posted an insider tip on their Die Hard 4 page. Apparently, Blood of Eden had landed in the Silver Pictures office, and they were thinking that it could be adapted into a great Die Hard flick.

Oh, irony.

I haven’t been able to drudge up the actual web pages (this was in March 2000, I think), but I’ve found a couple of bits quoted in other places. The tipster wrote this to Coming Attractions:

The story is set in a big bubble environment underwater, sort of like a submerged Biodome, but intelligently depicted. The hero is a security consultant working on the project, and his wife is on the project because she WORKS FOR THE JAPANESE COMPANY THAT BUILT THE SPHERE (I told you this was Die Hard). Which is called Eden Sphere, thus the title. While showing the sphere to a senator who reads like a John McCain clone, they are attacked by a team of ninja with all kinds of tech gear that take over the sphere on a mission of vengeance against the old Japanese man who rules over the company.

As I said, this is a Die Hard script, pure and simple, and fits almost exactly to the template needed to make a good DH4. It’s full of action, it takes place in a well developed and interesting setting, and it has some nice twists. It needs more jokiness to be a real Die Hard film, and will certainly undergo rewrites if chosen, but it could serve as a vehicle to bring DH back to its roots, as Willis wants. The only BIG problem I see with it is expense (Waterworld anyone?), but with CGI the way it is, that may not be as bad as it once would have been.

Pretty exciting. Why hadn’t we ever realized our story might be a great Die Hard flick?

Damn! I knew we shoulda done that underwater idea!

The Aussie film site Dark Horizons also posted an anonymous tip from someone called The American Connection:

Silver Pictures (Joel Silver’s production company) has a screenplay entitled “Blood of Eden”, which two unknown scribes hope to become “Die Hard 4″. The story takes place within the confines of an underwater complex known as ‘Eden’, and has one sequence featuring a security guard battling a group of Ninjas. If Silver wishes to return to the franchise again (he was involved with the first two films) pushing this script, then it has a good chance of succeeding.

One of the sites actually managed to get their hands on the in-house coverage written by a reader at the production office, which they printed in full. It knocked us for a few tiny things, but largely raved about the script. I can’t find that thing anywhere. Wish I could, because it was pretty cool to read the inside take on our work.

[UPDATE: Someone sent a link to the coverage, and I posted it in full here.]

No doubt you see where this is going, it being history, so I’ll cut to the end: they didn’t buy it, didn’t adapt it [back] into a Die Hard story, didn’t start Steve and I on big-time Hollywood writing careers. All in all, it was a very public “Attaboy!” packaged with some personal suspense as we waited for news.

And of course, Live Free or Die Hard came out in 2007, owing nothing at all to our hard work.

Still, we’re proud of it. It’s the kid who left home and almost made it big out there in the mean ol’ world. So now I’m going to let you read it, if you’d like, and you can see what all the fuss was about.

Just click the link below. If you read it, let me know what you think in the comments.

BLOOD OF EDEN

P.S. One last bit of trivia…At one point, the Senator in the script, who I did very consciously fashion after Sen. John McCain, calls the female leader of the bad guys a “cunt.” A few readers commented that this was a bit much, using such an ugly word and all, and couldn’t we change that one little thing to “bitch?” Well, of course we could, if somebody wanted to actually buy the script. But I put it in there in the first place because that’s what the character said in my head when I was writing it. It was, in my eyes, in character.

Then, a decade later,  this story came out during last year’s presidential campaign:

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, “You’re getting a little thin up there.” McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days. [The Real McCain, PoliPoint Press, 2008.]

I am redeemed. My writer’s instincts were dead on.

This version has gone much better, and more readers visit all the time, but that earlier stuff has been languishing over there, orphaned and sad.

Recently, LiveJournal has been having serious problems, and WordPress established a simple tool for LJ bloggers to import all their entries to blogs over here. I just used it, then went through and deleted all the posts I felt were uninteresting even in a historical context, posts with dead links, that sort of thing.

So, if you’re interested in knowing where my head was back in February and March 2004, now you can find out.

Pretty exciting, huh?

Back in the day, I worked in the roleplaying game industry.

I’m not talking rpg video games, like World of Warcraft or Oblivion (more’s the pity, because the money would have been way better). No, I’m talking good old fashioned face-to-face, throwin’ dice, drinkin’ root beer and eatin’ Doritos roleplaying games. I got into them when I was a young teen, starting with the original Dungeons & Dragons and moving on to many others like Champions, Traveller, and Daredevils. In my twenties, here and there I’d manage to get some short-lived game together, a little James Bond or Ghostbusters here, a little Paranoia or Justice Inc there.

Then I happened across White Wolf’s Werewolf: The Apocalypse one day (in which players assume the roles of lycanthropic ecoterrorists fighting demonic corporate forces to save the wilderness and the Earth itself). Werewolves have always been my favorite monster, I’m a devoted environmentalist, and the game is steeped in animistic spirituality which is my soul’s cup of tea…conceptually, it was a perfect storm for me. That led to scattered White Wolf gaming, which in time led to me actually working at the company. Which led to a bit of other rpg work, most notably for Feng Shui and its stillborn spinoff Pulp! (none of that work saw print, unfortunately, as Daedelus Games collapsed, though I did put some of it online…by the way, any Feng Shui players out there still have copies of my stuff? I lost it all in a hard drive crash).

These games get a bad rap from some people, and D & D is often cultural code for loser. But the fact of the matter is that many people who sneer at roleplayers spend their time watching crap like Desperate Housewives or American Idol, deadening their brains while the gamers hang out together and engage in an activity that has its roots in campfire storytelling and improv theater, an activity that’s inherently social and that exercises the mind.

But I digress. A few years ago, I managed to run a game for a group of friends who managed, more often than not, for a while, to actually get together regularly to play. The game was Shane Hensley’s great Savage Worlds. Ultimately, unfortunately, it’s really tough to keep a game going over time because people are, in groups, pretty unreliable, and entropy sets in till things just unravel.

One of the things I did, as things were unraveling, was to try to establish “pick up games” outside the continuing narrative of the main game, that we could play if someone in the group didn’t show up. That way, we’d still be playing something, the group would hold steady in its routine, and we could restart the main game “next” time…

For the pickup games, I decided to run short sword & sorcery adventures, focusing mainly on mood and action (as opposed to an involved narrative and character development), and in the spirit of Savage Worlds  I called them “Savage Tales.” And I wrote a short handbook describing the setting and telling the players how to design their characters for it.

Before the game evaporated for good, I think we actually played one such pickup game. Or maybe we just had an evening where we hung out and did the character creation. I can’t remember for sure. But I always liked the little handbook I put together, and the commentary within on the difference between epic fantasy (like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) and sword & sorcery (like Robert E. Howard’s Conan or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser):

If everyone can’t make it, we go to Europia. There, things are gonna be less epic saga, more survival skirmish. Conan could become a king in Europia, but Tolkien’d have his pipe crushed under some furred boot and be set to work the rest of his short life digging stones from cold earth.

There are no hobbity folk in Europia because they were eaten by snake-men aeons ago. The elves are mysterious and dark, and if you see one, it usually changes your life forever. The dwarves may exist or not, but grandpa says they eat human flesh. And the closest thing to an orc you’ve ever seen is that big ugly fucker down the bar you saw sodomizing an unconscious guardsman the other night…

Here’s the booklet. You might get a kick out of it. If you’re a gamer, you might even find something useful in it. But here it is.

SAVAGE TALES

Tim Byrd

There are several ways to get all the Timformation you need. This site, www.tim-byrd.com, home of my blog Under An Outlaw Moon, is of course one of them.

Here are some others, and more will likely follow:

Tim on Facebook

Tim on MySpace

Tim on Twitter

Tim on Goodreads

Tim on Amazon

Feel free to contact me through any of these sites, or through a comment on the blog. I’m friendly and rarely bite, though I am very busy being a dad and a writer and may not always be as prompt in replying as I’d like.

Also, no, I won’t read your story, novel, idea, diary, outline, fortune, pie chart, autobiography, recipe, or the bumps on your head. I’m bogged down in research, way behind on personal reading, generally even more behind in my daily life, and have been strongly advised not to look at other’s unpublished work for several solid legal reasons.

I am going to try to share any and all wisdom I may gain as a professional writer through this site, though that wisdom is rather slim so far. The main advice I can give is this:

“Write it. Then send it out till someone buys it. Till they do, write something else and send it out. Repeat.”

It’s as easy as that. And as difficult.

[NOTE: This info is replicated for permament reference on its own page, accessible through the menu bar down the right side of this page.]

It was accepted twice, but never published until now. First Ed Hall, then the editor of a visionary magazine-on-tape called Verb, wanted it to be in Verb’s first issue. We even did some studio time, recording me reading the story, which was thirsty work.

Then I got word that my favorite magazine, Pulphouse, wanted the story. To put things in context, Pulphouse was very well known in genre circles, and very respected. It’s the only magazine I’ve ever read that I liked nearly every story they published. Not only that, but they wanted to put my story in a special Harlan Ellison issue, and the idea of sharing pages with Harlan was intoxicating.

So, with Ed’s cheerful understanding, I pulled the story from Verb. They went on to have Ha Jin, Robert Olen Butler, and James Dickey in their first issue. They got coverage on All Things Considered on NPR.

Meanwhile, Pulphouse folded just before the issue that was supposed to feature my story.

The most public exposure the story ever got was thanks to children’s author and master storyteller Carmen Deedy, who loved it enough to read it out loud at a gathering or two. Oh, and Anne Rivers Siddons read and adored it, and gave me lots of encouragement.

I always planned to look for a new home for the tale, but never got around to it. Now, for the recession-appropriate price of free, you can download it to your magical computing box and read it to your heart’s content.

I’ve polished it very slightly,  mainly updating some cultural references, but it remains very much a product of the early eighties and a much younger writer. There’s some stuff in it about racists that seems kind of cartoonish these days (and I address that a bit in a new author’s note before the story). But mainly, it’s an odd bit of Southern magic realism owing more than a bit to Mark Twain and Stephen King.

Come on in, sit a while, and visit with the dead folks.

DEAD FOLKS

I always loved books, and always knew I wanted to write them. But I remember precisely when I consciously decided that it was going to be my job, not just one of the many varied and wondrous activities I was going to engage in while living my magnificent life (cowboy, spy, zoologist, astrophysicist, movie star…). I was in fourth grade, and I read Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Fog Horn” in an anthology. The story evoked such emotion, such a sense of deep eternal sadness, that it overwhelmed me. I’d always loved to read, and read damn near constantly, but that was the first time I truly grokked the true power of literature. And I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to it.

After that, I did, at least while growing up. I was always reading, but also always writing. I kept a bunch of stories going all at once, the same way I read, and as a result of both activities I actually managed to learn how to write. Then I grew up and started my lifetime of depressed procrastination. That’s another story though, and sad to say, I’m gonna put off writing it.

All this is preamble to a special holiday gift I’m gonna give you, which is a story I wrote in seventh grade, and is, far as I can tell, the earliest work of mine I still have on hand. I wrote it for a writing contest at a local college, and in the weeks leading up to the event, I boasted to everyone I could that I was going to win first place. I annoyed everyone with my arrogance so much I had them rooting for my downfall. Then the day came, and I won first place, which probably did not improve me as a human being, but did boost the ol’ ego (which actually needed the boost a great deal, confident as I was in my writing).

After this success, I had my first experience with an actual editor. I started writing a serialized space opera tale in the school newspaper, in which the heroes travelled the spaceways in a craft driven by a Bussard ramjet, named after Robert W. Bussard, the scientist who envisioned it. In spite of repeated protests from me, the editor changed it, every damn week, into a Buzzard ramjet, because, after all, Bussard wasn’t a word (and still isn’t, according to my spellcheck, which ironically doesn’t even offer up buzzard as a possible correction).

But I digress. Here, for your enjoyment or derision, is  a science fiction story by the thirteen year old me, uncorrected in any way despite many strong impulses. Merry Christmas.

U-TURN

Why me? Anderson thought to himself. Why not that clutz Garret, or even Steinberg?

The reason was, as he knew, that he was the most qualified of all the people who had tried out for the mission. Of course, to them the trip may not have even started yet, and the launch of the Einstein’s Dream might be just a germ of an idea, and just possibly a germ which hadn’t come into existence yet.

Anderson looked out of the port-hole to his side. This universe looked like the one of his origin, but he knew that it wasn’t. He was in a totally different reality, a reality where everything travelled faster than light, and the barrier to interstellar travel was that nothing could go slower than lightspeed. A “Tachyon Universe” they had called it. Anderson was, of course, familiar with the term “Tachyon”. He knew the strange particles to be similar to protons, and that they travelled faster than light. It was known, at least to him (the phrase “Time is relative” burned in his mind, and a grim smile touched his mouth), that for each normal particle of matter, there was a Tachyon particle of matter in a universe composed entirely of Tachyon protons, neutrons, electrons, etc.

The rest was relatively obvious (Anderson grimaced at the pun): in order to travel above the speed of light, one had to enter a Tachyon universe. That way, you could fly at a “normal” speed in said Tachyon universe, and when you reentered the familiar universe you could find yourself light centuries away from your starting point, and according to Einstein, just as many centuries in the past. Of course, Relativity had been bypassed with the creation of the Tachyon “drive”, so why couldn’t the effects of time be somehow changed too?

Well, the time was near now. He would change the entire mass of the Einstein’s Dream, including himself, from Tachyon to normal matter, placing him back in his home universe. He would finally see the results of fifty years of isolation, spent mostly in cryogenic suspension; but it was still a long time to have been without the company of another person. He hoped that that would soon be rectified. He would find the nearest star able to support human life and go to it, he hoped to find a new home.

Anderson’s brooding was abruptly interrupted by a dull voice which originated from a computer named S.I.S. 1, an acronym for Sensory Input System. SIS’s duties went further than that actually, but her builders thought “SIS” was better than some verbal monstrosity, so the name had been kept.

“Gary?” SIS inquired.

“What the hell do you want?” Anderson asked irritably.

“Five minutes to go before we enter the non-Tachyon universe.”

“How many times have I told you to call it the real universe?” the astronaut shouted.

“But–” the computer began.

“But nothing!” Anderson shouted, even louder than before. He was sick of hearing the non-human voice constantly, and the thoughts on the possible end of his isolation made him abnormally irritable to any reminder of it.

The next five minutes he watched the digits tick off on the atomic clock, and then he felt a tingling feeling and saw a sudden flash of tremendously bright light blink for a fraction of a second, momentarily blinding him. A moment later everything was as it had been, aside from an awful afterimage. The undetectable difference was that the ship, and everything aboard it, was now made of normal matter rather than Tachyon matter, and that it was in the universe of its origin.

“Where are we?” Anderson asked SIS.

“We are in an orbit exactly one A.U. in radius, around a G2 type star. According to our sensors a double planetary body is approaching rapidly.”

“Show me on the screen.”

The monitor screen flickered on, showing two glowing discs approaching. As they grew closer, Anderson gasped audibly. He was looking at Tellus and Luna. Andas he watched, he saw a smaller body leave Tellus and wink out in a brilliant flash of light. “That’s Tellus and Luna,” Anderson muttered, “but what was that?”

“I have discovered that the planets are indeed the Tellus-Luna system.”

“I know that, damn it. What was that other thing?”

“It was a Tachyon starship.”

Anderson laughed happily.

“That means that we aren’t in the past!” he yelled in a gleeful tone. “There was no time dilation — we’re in the future! They’re still using Tachyon ships too! Home at last!”

“We are not in the future, Gary.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“The ship you saw departing Tellus was the Einstein’s Dream.”

Understanding came to Gary E. Anderson, and he laughed aloud at the peculiar irony of his situation.

Einstein’s theory was right after all. When you went faster than light, time went backwards. Therefore, since he had travelled beyond lightspeed for fifty years, his “present” had moved fifty years into the past, returning him to almost the exact moment he had left Tellus.

He laughed again as he saw the view on another screen. A Tachyon starship appeared in a falsh of light, in the same spot Anderson had materialized in just seconds before. He laughed again.

On the ship’s side was the name Einstein’s Dream.

Part 1 can be found at http://outlawmoon.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/the-fall-from-grace-in-genesis-wild-nature-civilization-and-the-ecological-soul

Part 2 is at http://outlawmoon.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/part-2-of-the-fall-from-grace-in-genesis-wild-nature-civilization-and-the-ecological-soul

Part 3 is at http://outlawmoon.wordpress.com/2008/10/22/part-3-of-the-fall-from-grace-in-genesis-wild-nature-civilization-and-the-ecological-soul

Part 4 is at http://outlawmoon.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/part-4-of-the-fall-from-grace-in-genesis-wild-nature-civilization-and-the-ecological-soul

The Fall From Grace in Genesis: Wild Nature, Civilization, and the Ecological Soul, Part 5

And how do we live the myth? U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cueller provided a clue: “The ancestral wisdoms of the human race taught us to look at the Earth as alive and not an inanimate object of aggression and pillage. For countless ages, harmony between man and the biosphere was the basis of human living. We are witnessing now the effects of the loss of this delicate balance…[we need] a new vision, a new loyalty, an Earth patriotism as strong as any national patriotism to relieve the distress of our ailing and exhausted planet.” [Keynote speech, World Forum on Human Survival, Moscow, January 1990]

And the words of Pulitzer Prize winning bacteriologist Rene Dubos provide similar insight: “I now realize how much my life would have been enriched by longer and more intimate contacts with wilderness. The experience of nature in a primitive prairie, a desert, a primeval forest, or high mountains not crowded with tourists is qualitatively different from what it is in a well-tended meadow, wheat field, an olive grove, or even in the high Alps. Humanized environments give us confidence because nature has been reduced to the human scale, but the wilderness in whatever form almost compels us to measure ourselves against the cosmos.” [Rene Dubos, The Wooing of the Earth, 1980]

There is hope, and potential guidance, in the new  and growing fields of eco- and environmental psychology. James Swan and Theodore Roszak, both quoted earlier, are major voices in this movement. Roszak has written a book, The Voice of the Earth, in which his central thesis is that the most important human relationship for psychologists to explore and to nurture is that between the human being and the natural world, yet modern psychology does not do this. It focuses on the individual’s relationship to self, to family, to society…but stops dead before dealing with the very living fabric from which we sprang, the warp and woof of the intricately interwoven tapestry that is nature. He suggests that, perhaps, the “primal crime” mightn’t have been “the prehistoric betrayal of the father, but the act of breaking faith with the mother: Mother Earth — or whatever characterization we might wish to make of the planetary biosphere as a vital, self-regulating system.” [Roszak, 1993] The prescription for our ills? A renewal of a sense of sacredness towards the natural world, and renewed intimacy with that world.

Another psychologist, Michaael J. Cohen, takes this a bit further, even doing fieldwork appropriate to the concept:

Integrated Ecology recognizes that biologically and feelingfully, we and the natural world are “Us” for we are as connected to each other as is our leg to our body. Us is our own and every other person’s true inner nature bound to Us, the natural world, Creation’s unadulterated nature…Because we predicate our survival on the conquest of nature, our society educates and pays us to assault Us. Our authorities teach us to spend, on average, over 95% of our lives indoors, excessively separated from nature. Collectively, we spend less than 1 day per person per lifetime in tune with natural areas. We live over 99% of our adult lives knowing the non-languaged natural world through abstract words, facts, and pictures about it, not through enjoyable sensory connections with it.

We learn to estrange ourselves from Us within and about us, from natural love, support and beauty. Being born and raised bewildered (wilderness-severed) assaults our thinking and our inner nature…Losing feelingful support from our multitude of natural attractions stresses us. Bewildered, we helplessly seek help from equally nature-estranged helpers. In America alone, stress resulting from our excessive nature disconnection causes 44 million of us to suffer from the apathy that leads to acute mental disorders, drug abuse and low self-esteem. Our stressed immune systems invite diseases that further stress us. Stress dissolves 50% of marriages and erodes the love in many others. It fuels the irrationality of alcoholism, greed, cigarette smoking and violence. The cost: 500,000 deaths per year and $250 billion spent from the health care system. Over 70% of our medical problems are stress-related.

We are not islands. As we remain estranged from Us, our negative social and environmental indicators rise. In the last decade we spent over 100 billion dollars in the war on drugs alone, yet because nature-estranged education, psychologies and therapies don’t address our estrangement, more people are addicted now than a decade ago.

Welcome to Babel. Yet there is hope; Cohen goes on to describe an “all-season, consensus-governed, outdoor-living program” he founded in 1959, which “immersed its intimate school community in critical thinking, rich interpersonal experiences and natural wonders…”

Participants thrived in 83 different natural habitats…The experience deeply connected our inner nature to the whole of nature. As a result of our romance with educating ourselves this way, in the school community: Chemical dependencies, including alcohol and tobacco, disappeared as did destructive social relationships…Personality and eating disorders subsided…Violence, crime and prejudice were unknown in the group…Academics improved because they were applicable, hands-on and fun…Loneliness, hostility and depression subsided. Group interactions allowed for stress release and management; each day was fulfilling and relatively peaceful…

His list of beneficial effects goes on, the final one being that when vacation times came, none of the students wanted to go home. “They were home.”

The secret to our success was to learn directly from the natural world, the living earth within and about us. Through natural sensations and feelings it taught us how to trust it, how to validate and incorporate its wisdom. From 30 years of all-season travel and study in over 260 national parks, forests, and sub-cultures, I developed a learning process and psychology that unleashed our natural ability to grow and survive responsibly… [Micheal J. Cohen, "Integrated Psychology: The Process of Counseling With Nature." The Humanistic Psychologist, Journal of the Division of Humanistic Psychology, American Psychological Association, Autumn 1993]

And here we have the key to Eden’s gates, a simple renewal of natural awareness, an at least intermittent, vigorous dive back into the wondrous relationship to be had beyond our walls. Experiences in the wilds, even in the domesticated wilds of our own yards, even in the grid-lined wilds of a city park, even in a day-hiked wild twenty minutes past the suburbs, will bring to us possibilities for flow, for joy, for ecstasy, and a chance for emotional and physical health we can bring back with us, to enjoy in the living room, the office.

Eden is out there waiting — you simply have to get off your couch and go there. Thoreau told us that “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” [Thoreau, 1851] I contend that in wildness is the preservation of man, as well. Or, as John Hay put it:

Wildness takes such care of wildness that it must always be the earth’s criterion of health.” [John Hay, The Immortal Wilderness, 1987]